


Unwanted Inheritances

by salanaland



Series: Skywalker Family Feels [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22465411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salanaland/pseuds/salanaland
Summary: One sleep-deprived princess, one Force ghost, and way too many coincidences.
Relationships: Leia Organa & Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader
Series: Skywalker Family Feels [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1616419
Comments: 6
Kudos: 268





	Unwanted Inheritances

This is difficult, boring work, and Leia's eyes started hurting after a few hours of squinting at the terrible spelling and worse bigotry of Imperial record keepers, so she's been more than happy to allow the droids to help with her data collection. Especially the data from Tatooine. To be perfectly honest, she kind of doesn't _need_ to know if Jabba the Hutt kept records of his slaves, if he sent copies of his records to the Empire, if _her_ name appeared on his last transaction register before his death.

His death, by strangulation, at her hands. Ironic. Is it possible to inherit a murder method?

Leia had never before considered what she might have inherited from the birth parents she'd never wondered much about. She'd always known she was adopted, but had never in her life felt out of place. She'd had doting parents who'd nurtured her many talents, and a lovely homeworld that welcomed her. She had a vague idea of a beautiful, kind woman weighed down by sadness and anguish, but she couldn't even be sure if that was memory or daydream. But her _parents_ were real, and present, and loving.

To others they were the Queen and the Viceroy, but to Leia they were Mom who taught her to welcome refugees from the Empire's reign of terror, Dad who taught her not to fear those who were different. "After all," he'd told her when she was a child, curled in her mother's arms and listening to the soft humming of the pulmonodes that breathed for Queen Breha, "if your mother hadn't gotten hurt, we might never have met _you_ , and you have been the light of our lives as nobody else could _ever_ have been." Leia had put her tiny hand on the machinery that kept her mother alive, and fallen into the deep sleep of a child secure in her parents' love.

That awful day, on the Death Star, she'd screamed for her people, and for her parents, and for her _home_. Her heart had broken to know she'd never hug her father again, never hear the soothing hum of her mother's breathing again. And in that moment, watching the silent end of everything she had ever known, she felt a heavy hand on her shoulder, heard a harsh mechanical wheeze in her ear. For the first time ever, she'd actually _felt_ like an orphan.

Ironic.

What else of _his_ did she have? Was it _his_ face she wore? She hadn't asked Luke--her brother!--what _he_ looked like. Under the mask. If he even still looked human. Because if he was remotely _not horrible_ , wouldn't Luke have left him helmetless on his funeral pyre?

Leia had gone to see the pyre, from a distance. Not because she wanted to. Not to mourn. She'd gone mostly because Chewbacca had insisted, he'd told her that she had only the one chance to say goodbye, and whether she was ready _now_ or not, someday she might regret not having gone. So she'd followed the plume of foul-smelling smoke to its source, a clearing full of burning metal and circuitry and--and whatever remained of the man who'd loved the woman from Leia's dimmest memory, the man who'd been a Jedi and a pilot and a mass murderer and who didn't even know that he _had_ a daughter until the last few minutes of his life, just before he'd died saving his son.

Saving the galaxy, too. The galaxy he'd terrorized for Leia's entire life--and Luke's--and he'd thrown all that away. For _them_? For Luke at least. Luke who'd smelled like the pyre before he'd even kindled it, scorched metal and charred wires and shorted circuits and burnt flesh and the ozone reek of city thunderstorms. What had _happened_ to them? Luke hadn't said much to Leia about it, only that their father had found out about Leia and then sacrificed himself to save Luke's life, killing the Emperor in the process.

She'd loathed her birth father--their kinship mutually unrecognized--since she was old enough to hate. Her _real_ father, the viceroy, had told her once that there was true evil out there in the galaxy, but that fear and hatred would make that evil stronger. That she must try not to fear evil, not to hate even the cruelest beings out there. "Well, I _hate_ Darth Vader," she'd insisted, eyes alight with youthful fire. "Did you hear what he--"

" _Especially_ not him," Bail had told her firmly. "He--he gets stronger if you fear him and hate him. Promise me, Leia, _promise_ me that you will find a way not to fear or hate Darth Vader." At her stubborn glower, he'd pulled her into a big hug. "Your life may depend on it someday." Her father had been so insistent, Leia had begrudgingly given her promise, but try as she might, she'd only half kept it. And then Luke had _told_ her, on the forest moon of Endor, and her closely guarded hatred had spilled over into revulsion. And then Luke kept talking, and Leia's entire life was turned on its head. And then Luke walked into the forest, simply walked towards the Empire, towards certain death, towards _their father_ , leaving Leia in turmoil, fear and anger and disgust and dread roiling through her, offset only partially by the unexpected joy of knowing her dear friend Luke was in truth her _brother_.

Leia had fought the Empire her whole life. She'd fought with naive idealism, she'd fought from the depths of grief, she'd fought to rescue and protect her loved ones. And yet, and yet, in the end, the greatest single victory in her war was when her hated birth father had traded his life, _willingly_ , to destroy everything he'd spent decades working on--the subjugation of the galaxy, the Emperor's reign of terror, fear and hate on the most massive scale imaginable, the domination of the Dark over the Light.

This _monstrosity_ had stomped and wheezed through Leia's nightmares as long as she could remember. He'd threatened her, imprisoned her, tortured her. He'd frozen her beloved in carbonite. And then his last words were for _Leia_. Leia, whose head hasn't stopped spinning since she'd heard them from Luke. Sometimes it twists her up so much, she can barely breathe.

 _Ironic_.

Her whole life is the most utterly exquisite irony, a truth stranger than any fiction. The firm bedrock of her childhood has been blasted into a maelstrom of confusion, no more solid than a Tatooine sandstorm, or the asteroid field Alderaan became. She's spent _days_ just as she is now, cast adrift in her thoughts, eyes glazing as she dwells on everything she'd rather not think about, until a metallic clanging jolts her from her ruminating.

"Mistress Leia! Mistress Leia!" See-Threepio clatters around the _Falcon_ towards her, arm upraised in his peculiar way. Artoo follows, burbling excitedly, so Leia tries to summon an attentive look.

"You finished?"

"No, Mistress Leia, but Artoo found something of interest in the Tatooine records from before the Clone Wars."

Leia frowns. She's trying to gather data to push for galactic emancipation at the inception of the New Republic ( _of **course** it's very important, Leia, of **course** we don't support slavery, we just need to get the New Republic together first and **then** we can work on emancipation_) and she's not sure something from that long ago will be helpful. But Threepio is prattling on, undeterred. "...And perhaps this was some relative of Master Luke's--"

Artoo interrupts with a flurry of rude noises.

"--Or indeed of yours, Mistress Leia! I do beg your pardon!"

Leia rubs her eyes, trying to quell the headache that's been her constant companion since she stopped actually sleeping, since Endor. "All right, Artoo, let's see it." She waves her datapad vaguely in the astromech's direction, and he reaches out for the data port on the side of the holo-chess table, causing a list to spring up in midair. Has he _always_ been able to do that?

The list scrolls on its own to a record, which enlarges into a bill of sale for a slave, Shmi Skywalker, female, human, from a shop owner named Watto to a moisture farmer named Cliegg Lars.

Well, Leia doesn't know how common a name "Lars" is on Tatooine. Or "Skywalker", for that matter. There could be a hundred Skywalkers, a hundred Larses, on Tatooine. It could be entirely a coincidence that a slave with Luke's last name was owned by a moisture farmer with Luke's uncle's last name. It _could_.

"It's not what it looks like," a man's voice says softly, sadly, in Leia's ear.

She turns just enough to see the glow over her shoulder, to see Luke's blue eyes in a face that's _almost_ her own, and then she's running, as fast and as far as she can. Which, in the _Falcon_ , isn't far at all, just into the cramped sanitation alcove, where she braces herself over the sad excuse for a basin. She's not sure if she has to vomit, or just wants _water_ , to wash out the taste of sand and bile.

"You've never run from me before," the voice points out behind her, sad and a little stilted, like the speaker is used to pacing his words unnaturally, navigating some physical limitation on his speech.

Well.

Leia takes a deep breath, and another. And another, to calm herself. And she stands up and straightens her back and turns to face her lifelong nemesis. "I _have_. On the _Tantive IV_ , on the first Death Star. On Hoth, on--"

"No." His eyes crinkle just a little as he half smiles. "You ran _towards_ your mission. _Towards_ your friends. Towards _freedom_. I just happened to be behind you, on the wrong side." He taps his chest with mechanical fingers, then shrugs as if he's forgotten how to.

Leia wants to argue, but he's absolutely right. And, yes, she's always fought for freedom in the abstract, been thoroughly willing to lay down her life for the freedom of others; but lately, _freedom_ has a smaller and more personal aspect. Ever since--no, she can _not_ stand here and look her enemy in the eye and dwell on the chain and the collar and that stupid, degrading _thing_ she was forced to wear--

"Leia?" The translucent face is far too close to her own, and she flinches away from the concern on it, stumbling back. _On your feet, Princess,_ she demands of herself. _You've never trembled before Darth Vader in your life, and there's no reason to start now!_

"What is it, Leia?" he asks gently, and she sees from the corner of her eye that he's backed up to the far wall of the corridor, no longer looming over her, unguarded worry and contrition all over his face. _Of course,_ she thinks absently and inconsequentially, _he's probably got no sabacc face after so long behind a literal mask_. "I'm truly sorry if my words hurt you." He slumps in on himself, the very image of awkward remorse.

" _Freedom_ ," she grates out, averting her eyes in shame. "It's... I... It means _more_ now. It was huge and abstract, now it's unbearably close and specific, and I don't _know_ , I _can't_ \--" She slides to the floor, hating her weakness.

There's a sound of rustling robes that registers only in her brain, not her ears, followed by a trembling whisper, very close: "Who took away your freedom, Leia?"

"Jabba," she admits, closely examining a suspicious stain on the floor.

She hadn't really realized that he wasn't breathing until she hears him do so; a sharp inhalation entirely distinct from his mechanized respiration in life. " _Jabba_ ," he spits, then proceeds to mutter angrily--and coarsely--in Huttese. Leia tries to follow what he's saying, but she's not quite fluent enough to understand it all. "That ungrateful _slug_. How _dare_ he? After I saved _his_ child, he does _that_ to _mine_! I will--I don't know how--but I will _end_ him--"

"No!" Leia turns to shake a finger in the ghost's face, which surprisingly shuts him up. Then she considers. "Actually...if it makes you feel better, you _did_ have a part in his death. Because _you_ made _me_ , and _I_ killed Jabba."

He half rises from where he's crouched. "How?"

"With my chains." It makes her skin crawl to say the words _my chains_ , and she tries to cover her shudder by miming Jabba being garroted.

"A human can't choke a Hutt, the fat layer is too thick and..." He trails off, eyes widening.

She shrugs. "I did." Best not to think too closely about it. Especially in present company. "I don't really want to talk about it. Right now. With you." She shrinks in on herself, quaking with the effort of holding together.

"That's fair." They sit in silence for some time; he taps his thumbs together. "Ah--" he clears his throat unnecessarily. "I podraced to freedom."

Leia considers this thoroughly before replying. "Humans...can't race pods." Her heart thuds unevenly as she struggles to re-adjust. As far as revelations go, _your father podraced his way out of slavery_ is a close second to _your father is Darth Vader_. "It's... That's pretty impressive."

"That makes it sound like I did it all on my own, but I had loads of help," he rushes to explain. "My mother, of course. And there was a Jedi. And..." he smiles tenderly. "And a queen, in disguise. They had a broken ship, and an urgent mission, and they made their way to Mos Espa, and found a junk shop." His smile turns sharp and bitter. "And the shop owner's two human slaves, a mother and her young son."

Leia thinks about what he's saying, and not saying, and the bill of sale she'd seen. "How young?"

He carefully examines the same stain on the floor. Or perhaps a different one; there's no shortage of the things. "Nine."

"Nine?" Her voice rises and breaks, hoarse with incredulity. " _Nine_? No offense, but what use is a nine-year-old slave?"

He jerks his chin up with pride. "I was _very_ good at fixing things. I built a _droid_ out of spare parts. I built my own _pod_. And maybe Watto was planning to bet on me in races, when I was a little older."

Leia nods. "You'd be a ringer, he'd have a good hustle because everyone knows--"

In unison, " _Humans can't race pods_."

He nods. "Exactly. And Watto loved betting on the pod races, that's how he won us from Gardulla the Hutt to begin with, when I was three." He waves a hand vaguely. "She _never_ won her bets, even when Jabba tried to rig the races to help his slimy girlfriend."

Leia tries not to startle, and mostly succeeds. "He rigged the podraces? What about when you--"

"He tried, or at least his lackeys did. Not in _my_ favor, of course. But I won anyway." He smirks a bit. " _Without_ cheating."

" _You_ didn't use the Force?" She rolls her eyes in disbelief.

"Not any more than I used it for day-to-day life. I mean, I didn’t have any training then, just fast reflexes, a bit of precognition... Not more than _you_ use it to shoot stormtroopers. It was just a little, but enough to get Qui-Gon's attention." He ducks his head. "I thought then that Jedi were supposed to help _everyone_. That maybe he was on Tatooine to free _all_ the slaves, not just the one he thought could be a Jedi someday. But obviously not."

"I'm trying," Leia murmurs, hot shame crawling up the back of her neck. "Nobody wants to help but Luke and Han and Chewie, but _I'm trying_."

"I know." When she looks up at him, Anakin Skywalker's smile shines brighter than a Tatooine double sunrise. "You and your brother are _very_ persuasive."


End file.
